The Knapp Commission Didn't Know It Couldn't Be Done

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

“IT is said that there is a code of silence among police that is greater than the omerta of the underworld,” veteran cop and police investigator Captain Daniel McGowan testified at the Knapp Commission hearings. And, as every cop down to beat level knew until last October—and one very gabby one unwittingly said into a Knapp investigator's concealed transmitter—the commission was a joke. “They [the Knapp Commission],” the cop rattled on in the tape made last May, “have no power. None at all. All they can do is recommend to the police department. They end next month. The end of June they run out of money.”

In fact, almost everything the cop had to say was so, and there were even some problems he hadn't covered. Money can be scrounged somewhere, but the subpoena power can't, and the commission's authority to command witnesses and evidence through subpoena ran out in June. So did the money—not surprisingly, since despite its broad and difficult mandate, the commission had a piddling $540,000 in city and Federal grants to work with. The only official help it received after June was an extra grant of $22,000 from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in Washington, which the agency somehow managed to pull out of its back pocket, enabling the commission to keep just two of its staff agents and four of its lawyers, including chief counsel Michael Armstrong, on the payroll throughout the summer. The decimated staff was owed a month's pay when it went into its first hearings. Though contributions from a variety of individuals and foundations have brought the payroll up to date, the commission itself at the year's end did not yet have enough money to carry it into February, when it expects to present its report and recommendations and end its official existence.

So it was not surprising that when the commission's chairman announced at.the end of September that public hearings would be held several weeks later, only a few in the city, who by good or ill fortune possessed a special insight into the commission's activities, anticipated anything more than the usual droning witnesses and academic observations. Certainly, almost no one expected to see even one, let alone three, New York City cops spilling tale after tale of police corruption, implicating themselves as well as others, while every television channel in the city trained its cameras on them. But impresario‐interrogator Michael Armstrong teased the city with films of a police payoff, then shocked it by producing the recipient, Plainclothesman William Phillips, 40, a dapper man with self‐possession, a flashy car and 14 years on the force; next came hero cop Edward Droge,.25 and frightened, close to tears as Armstrong carefully led him through a story just above the line separating bathos from pathos; finally, a dismissed narcotics cop, Waverly Logan, 30, flat‐voiced and stiff, describing hopeless corruption in what had been a promising innovation, a squad of minority‐group policemen recruited traffic in the ghetto.

Inevitably, their testimony created public and political pressures which conditioned the atmosphere for the second round of hearings held last month. This time the question posed, like the witnesses who appeared, did not lend itself to the tight, revelatory control of Armstrong and the commission; it was no longer a matter of whether extensive police corruption existed, but of why something wasn't done four years ago when two crusading young cops, Frank Serpico and David Durk, first complained of it to high city officials. The commission summoned former Police Commissioner Howard Leary, his first deputy, John Walsh, lesser police lights, former city investigation commissioner Arnold Fraiman (now a judge) and, finally, prominent mayoral aide Jay Kriegel. Their testimony, diStilled, was a story of substantial neglect and sorrow in handling the charges, and even the psyches, of Serpico and Durk; and the brilliant, 31‐year‐old Kriegel, an attorney, was caught ignominiously in a web spun from his own conflicting testimony, confirming for many the suspicion that bath he and the Mayor were trying to save Lindsay's political skin. The commissioners were caught by surprise when Kriegel, in public, changed the testimony he had given in private, but they made amply, damagingly clear that there had been a change. “We'll never prove it,” said one observer on the commission, “but somebody told Kriegel to take the heat and he took it.”

IN retrospect, it seems clear that almost everyone — certainly the tape ‐recorded, disastrously wrong cop, apparently the rest of the force up to its commissioner, Patrick Murphy, Mayor Lindsay and most of the press—had consistently underestimated the man who, it turns out, gave the commission a good deal more than his name; there is a tough independence behind the mild, often ruffled demeanor of the prim‐looking, 62‐year‐old Wall Street lawyer, Whitman Knapp. And they underrated even more the independence, tenacity and dramatic flair of chief counsel Armstrong, who managed to place his three precious cops center stage with the help of a shifting team of borrowed crewmen — investigators drawn from the undercover rosters of Federal agencies, lawyers, and informants all over the ‐ghetto. Last month, when Armstrong and the commission were able to give the city a rare insight into high places, his staff, aside from himself, consisted of one other lawyer.

Whether they were short of the investigative machinery that cash can buy or the subpoena power that makes it run, Armstrong, Knapp and the other commissioners were simply not about to give up on an undercover investigation that had just begun to be productive last June, any more than they were prepared in the last few months to let even the likes of Commissioner Murphy and John Lindsay impugn the integrity of their witnesses or their work. And, so far, they have won almost all their battles.

When the supposedly reformminded commissioner decided early in the first hearings to denounce Phillips, a key witness, as a “traitor” and a “rogue cop,” a shocked and angry Armtrong said: “I used to think Murphy's attitude was tremendously hopeful. But if he's just going to try to assuage morale by pretending that what's going on doesn't exist, then he and we won't be able to accomplish the reform he says he wants.” It was not just talk; soon after, the Knapp Commission, the U. S. Attorney of the Southern District in New York and the Manhattan District Attorney's office combined to persuade Murphy that when he stripped Phillips and Droge of their badges and guns he made a mistake in stopping their pay. He restored it. Armstrong turned from wrath to positive reinforcement: “I think Pat has finally come to realize that we're on his side, the side of effecting real reforms.”

Mayor Lindsay was to discover the same firmness when he tried, at the height of the spectacularly successful first hearings, to claim credit for them during a TV appearance by dubbing the commission his “creature.” The paternity was legitimate enough, but the commissioners did not take kindly to the filing of the birth certificate at that particular time; instead they felt more strongly than ever that something had to be done to allay a growing public suspicion that they were indeed what the Mayor claimed them to be—even though, as Knapp says, he never once consulted Lindsay on the conduct of the hearings or investigation. “I didn't think it was proper,” Knapp said, in his fashion.

In his, Armstrong said: “Sure Lindsay gave birth to us, but we've operated independently ever since. Saying that kind of thing only makes it that much more difficult for us to gain credibility as a truly independent agency. I said months ago when we started that we were going to follow this thing through to its end and if it led to the Mayor's door we were going right in. I meant that and still mean that. Why should some poor cop have to take the rap if some fat cat in City Hall is immune from investigation?” A few days later, Whitman Knapp sat down in front of a barrage of microphones and announced there would be a new set of hearings, airing in public the testimony of Kriegel, Fraiman, Durk and Serpico—testimony that was originally scheduled for the much murkier environs of the commission's final report.

If that wasn't convincing enough evidence of the commission's determination to stay, independent, the events surrounding last month's hearings were. For while pressure mounted to call Lindsay to the stand and have him testify to his actions in 1967 when Durk and Serpico first made their charges, the commission balked. “We went to talk to Lindsay,” Knapp said, revealing on TV the potentially damaging information that he had spent two hours with the Mayor and Kriegel the day before the hearings began. Knapp continued: “We got his testimony. And we concluded that letting the Mayor testify would add little or nothing to our findings here on police corruption or even what happened four years ago. Instead, we felt that it would just mean we would lose our whole focus in a political circus act. I don't intend to let the Mayor or anyone else use my commission as a platform to further his political ends.” And though only history will decide the wisdom of that decision, it was made perhaps painfully clear to everyone that the Mayor's “creature” had become, in Whitman Knapp's mind, “my commission;” and nobody was going to push it around.

PRHAPS Lindsay's overeagerness in claiming credit for the commission's attention ‐getting work is understandable; the Knapp group, after all, was his second try at dealing with the politically dangerous problem of widespread police corruption after a series of articles on ‐the subject, based on information from the frustrated Durk and Serpico, appeared in The New York Times. Lindsay's first response, in April, 1970, was the hastily pulledtogether Rankin Commission, named for its head, former city Corporation Counsel Lee Rankin. Only weeks later, he decided to name a new commission, and both Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan and Bronx District Attorney Burton Roberts, who had served under Rankin, came up wi'h the same name for chairman of the new group: Whitman Knapp. He was almost as distant from the city's hierarchy as Rankin had been close. Knapp had been an assistant district attorney under both Hogan and his predecessor. Thomas E. Dewey, but he left Hogan's office in 1950 to enter private law practice, and his only connection with the city in the intervening 20 years had been a brief stint as president of the nowdefunct Youth House.

“I couldn't imagine wnat the Mayor might be calling about,” says Knapp now. “I hadn't spoken to him for four years and at that point we had a disagreement. I didn't think that he was still concerned about that!” he says with a laugh. “Then, as he mentioned the Rankin Commission and talked about its disbandment, I thought he was going to ask me as a friend to ask Hogan to keep it going. It was only when he started talking about this new commission and the paragon of virtue that they would need to lead it that it dawned on me the Mayor was talking about me.

“If I have one weakness,” he says, self‐mocking, “it's that I'm very susceptible to flattery.”

Maybe so, but as the city was to find out fairly conclusively over the next 19 months, Knapp was also inc'ined to get things right. “Before I accepted,” he says, “I went to Lindsay to satisfy myself that this was not going to be a whitewash job. And I got my answer when he told me the commissioners he had in mind.”

The three the mayor suggested were Franklin Thomas, a quiet but forceful black who had not only served as the police department's top legal counsel but also as an assistant U. S. attorney; former U. S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus VanCe; and Joseph Monserrat, a member and at that time president of the city's Board of Education. “This had to be on the up and up,” Knapp says, “if that was the stature and experience of the people Lindsay had in mind.” Knapp added Arnold Bauman (replaced later by

” I said months ago that we were going to follow this thing through to its end and if it led to the Mayor's door we were going right in. Why should some poor cop have to take the rap.. ,” piquant and penetrating John Sprizzo, a former prosecutor now teaching at Fordham, when Bauman came up against time pressures), who besides serving as a top prosecutor in the city had, at one time, conducted a U. S. Senate investigation of police corruption in Washington.

Next the commission had to find a chief counsel. Bauman and Thomas suggested Armstrong, then a corporate litigator with Cahill, Gordon. Sonnett, Reindel & Ohl, whom they remembered for his distinctive five and a half years as a prosecutor and chief of the securities fraud division under Thomas's old boss, former U. S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau. “They told me he was a real tiger,” Knapp recalls.

Bauman called Armstrong, who got leave from his law firm, where he was earning substantially more than his $41,000 a year salary as commission counsel. ‐Knapp quickly got a pledge of the $325,000 in city money he thought he needed; after a considerable, but short‐lived, fight the City Council bestowed six months of subpoena power on his commission; and all that seemed left to do was collect a staff of agents and lawyers and start the investigation.

BUT as it turned out, the commission's troubles had just begun; within weeks its money nearly flew out the window. “We were at one of the regular commission meetings having lunch,” Armstrong recalls, “when my secretary called and said the Board of Estimate had just failed to vote our funds,” which needed a two‐thirds majority to go through. “I said ‘What?’ and she repeated it. But I'll never forget Whit Knapp's reaction. He picked up the phone, called the Mayor and said, ‘John, I'm sitting here at lunch with the commission and we just heard the news. All we want to know is who's going to pay for the meal.” In true dens ex machina fashion, the Mayor came to the commission's aid: the next day he reconvened the board and got their money through on a simple majority vote in altered parliamentary circumstances.

For the next few months things moved apace, but other formidable problems were ahead. In’ October, 1970, a group of police sergeants brought a rash of suits against the use of the commission's subpoena power, rendering it virtually useless for seven months, until the last, of the cases was finally resolved in the commission's favor last May. Then the power itself was due to run out. And so was the commission's hardwon money.

“It was preposterous,” says Armstrong, looking back and in so saying characterizing the whole history of the Knapp Commission, “to have thought we could carry out such an enormous task as investigating the whole New York City Police D_epartment with six months of authority and six months of funds.” He pointed out that in September of 1970 he was still interviewing agents and had barely begun any solid investigation. And though a six‐month extension of the subpoena power, until June of last year, proved fairly easy to get—even though it took a late‐night session of the City Council to push it through—the money was not exactly flowing in. “With the Mayor talking about payless paydays and our not very popular cause,” notes Armstrong wryly, “it didn't seem likely that the city was going to cough up more dough.” Washington did, however; funds from The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration arrived in December, 1970. But even then the commission ran lean—usually with eight or ten agents instead of the planned twelve —so lean, in fact, that even its counsellors‐at‐law were pressed into service as in‐vestigators.

“I remember one evening last spring,” says Armstrong, who lives in Scarsdale, “when I got home late and was just settling down for a drink and some dinner when I got a call. One of our agents had to leave his surveillance post and go to another case. So I got in my car, drove to midtown and took up his beat until 5 AM.”

Another Knapp attorney, who for years had worked as a high‐priced marketing consultant in downtown Manhattan, had an even more unnerving experience last summer when he went uptown, to Harlem, to spell the commission's two overworked under cover agents. “I could blend in fairly well because I'm dark complexioned,” says 53‐year‐old Julius Impellezeri who, though he doesn't drink or smoke, posed as a wino while observing narcotics activity. “With old clothes, my hair a little longer and two days’ growth of beard, It was pretty easy, mainly because nobody knew me. One lady threw me off a stoop because they didn't like winos around that house.” But one day, Impellezeri was stopped by a man he knew—a former shoeshine boy for whom the then well‐turned‐out executive had done some free consulting and who now owned a novelty store in the neighborhood. “I had to go inside and meet his wife and all the time he kept looking at me like he wanted to take me in and feed me. It was a helluva mess. I didn't blow my cover, but I was finished anyway. Somebody in the area knew me.”

Armstrong is vociferous in giving almost total credit for the results of his investigation to the actual commission agents. “They worked weekends and nights to put this whole thing together,” he says. “One agent quit his job to come with us. And when we were down to so few last summer, one or another would come sneaking back to give us a hand when they could.” The agents, who carried no guns, ran into some amusing as well as dangerous situations, many of which attested to the same insouciance about corruption among the cops that the hearings so clearly indicated.

In one early eye‐opening incident last January, two Knapp agents were walking around Greenwich Village at 3 A.M., checking on afterhours establishments, when they saw no fewer than eight cops in uniform pull up in front of a meatpicking plant and proceed to rob it blind. The agents rushed to the phone.and one, without identifying himself, called the local precinct to report the crime.

“We know all about that burglary and we're looking into it,” the officer on duty said.

“But do you know that the guys that are conducting it are in blue uniforms just like yours?” the incredulous agent said.

“No,” said the officer, “but we'll check it out.” They finally did—five hours later—and only after the agents had placed several more calls, some to division headquarters. While the cops were thus occupied, reports Armstrong, “six prisoners escaped from the Federal House of Detention around the corner from the plant.”

In another case last summer, agent Ralph Cipriani (a former FBI man who testified at the hearings) and another agent inadvertently pulled their truck up right behind the car of a Harlem cop they suspected of selling narcotics. “There we were,” says Cipriani, “two white guys driving and our black informant hops out of the truck, makes his trade, and hops back in with us. All the cop had to do was look in the rear‐view mirror to see something was wrong. But he just drove off.”

One seemingly misplaced effort actually paid off. Unable to find a known madam at the midtown address they had been given, two agents, posing as Johns, went to a nearby building and asked the doorman for her whereabouts. The doorman told them that the prostitute they were looking for had indeed flown, but that for $5 he would introduce them to “a great party upstairs.” The transaction done, the agents met the new madam—and turned up one of their best informants on prostitution and the police.

THE first big break came last spring when Teddy Ratnoff, a maven in the esoterica of listening devices who was working for the commission, blew his cover in front of the then unsuspecting corrupt plainclothes cop, William Phillips. Two other agents who had been covering Ratnoff moved in and hustled Phillips off to the commission's offices. “I knew I was dead from the minute I saw that transmitter on Teddy,” Phillips said at the time. “But,” (grinning) “I'd still like to get that rat.”

When commission counsel Armstrong began the standard warning to Phillips—to tell the truth or get hanged in court later—the cop interrupted. “Mr. Armstrong,” he said, “you don't have to go through all that. I've sat where you're sitting I don't know how many times before and I know what I have to do.” He did even more than he had to, turning up evidence (this time he was wired up) on Mafia figures as well as cops. As a consequence, he put himself in so much danger that he is still being protected by Federal marshals in parts unknown. He did manage to score a small point against Ratnoff before vanishing. Against orders and with a wink at Armstrong, Phillips, while he was testifying in public for the commission, dropped Ratnoff's name into the record, telling the world what only the commission had known. One man who was listening was District Attorney Frank Hogan, whose detectives shortly thereafter raided Ratnoff's home and hauled off what must be a unique collection of recorded conversations.

WAVERLY LOGAN, the former narcotics cop turned cab driver, had hinted on a TV show that he had been involved in more than one incident of graft‐taking but nevertheless resisted the pleas of commission agents that he join them. “I told those Knapp people time and again when they called,” said the spindly Logan, “that they weren't on the level. I'd already found out that no one in the police department was on the level. But, finally they convinced me they were. I wanted to help them because I felt it would help me and my people, and these guys convinced me they were trying to do the same thing by exposing police corruption.” Logan not only led Knapp investigators to two excellent ‘police narcotics informants but took the stand at the public hearings to testify against himself. A black who grew up in a middle‐class section of Queens, he now has moved to‐California.

Edward Droge, the third New York City cop who surfaced at the Knapp hearings, had already enrolled at the University of Southern California with a legal career in mind when he was stunned by a phone call from New York: Commission agents had taped him a month before while he accepted a $200 bribe to help throw his case against a narcotics defendant. Typically, Armstrong asked for and got some of the freelance, unpaid help that stretch‐, ed the commission's resources. One of his law firm associates, on a business trip to California, took the tape along and played it for Droge. He called Armstrong. “I'll come back, but could the commission pay my way for a roundtrip ticket? I don't think I have that much money,” he said. “No, I don't think we can,” said Armstrong, waiting. Then, as the light dawned, Droge said, “I guess I don't need a round‐trip ticket, do I?” “No, I guess you don't,” said Armstrong.

Because it had not yet accumulated the evidence it wanted, the commission decided to postpone the public hearings originally scheduled for last Ape and instead issued an interim report. It was immediately attacked as general and unspecific by Edward Kiernan, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. The damaging public testimony, specific enough for anyone's taste, followed, and Kiernan joined the consider. able ranks of those who had not taken an accurate measure of Knapp and his men.

Knapp, who was so mikeshy when the hearings began that he often gave the impression that he didn't know what his commission was doing, says he and the other members were actually reluctant to go public. “In the first set of hearings, there were the obvious dangers of doing unjust damage to police morale and the fact that they might, jeopardize civil liberties and also the prosecution of cases. But as time went on and more and more things developed during the summer, we all became convinced that public hearings were the only way to bring the full nature of corruption in this city into public focus. In the second round, we faced a different problem —losing our focus on police reform in some kind of political circus act. But we decided that they, too, were necessary in order to establish that we weren't covering up anything.”

Just as Armstrong credits the work of his agents, Knapp credits “Michael,” and with good cause. Armstiong spent grueling hours, often until 3 A.M., looking still like the perfect prime time version of Mr. District Attorney the next day, wittily and deftly leading some witnesses through their true, but inverted. detective stories, and others through a morass of top‐level neglect. Relaxed, even casual, he stood through two bomb scares on the steps outside the hearing building, quipping with the crowd around him—flashing that quick Irish smile under bright blue eyes and a slightly tousled shock of dark hair. Before each hearing, he was everywhere, polishing up the day's script and scene. Later, unfrazzled and easy, he answered questions from the mob of newsmen who daily surrounded him in a blaze of TV lights and a barrage of mikes and cameras, obviously enjoying the limelight and readily conceding, “It's fun.”

“I'm taking a lot of heat from my friends,” Armstrong said one evening, with a pleased but slightly embarrassed grin. “You know, I can't even go buy a newspaper with someone I know anymore. They tease me by pestering the salesman to be sure and get my autograph. This guy's a celebrity,’ they say.”

AND so he is, at least for today, but‐the_ qupstinn that remains in most politically oriented minds is, what is this stellar ‐quality personality running for? He is Catholic but not rabid about it; a Democrat but, as he puts it, “a maverick one, I don't vote a straight ticket"; a self‐styled “law and order” type who is also a card‐carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union; a 39‐year‐old commuter with a wife and three children. What is he running for? The answer is, at least now, a sincere: “Nothing. I may change my mind in a few years, but this, the hearings and the investigation, are something I like. It's a chance to do a specific job and get it done—where your success depends more on competence than charisma. Beyond that like to be my own man. don't think I'd be able to make the compromises you have to make to be a good politician. And frankly, I can't see myself running around from one women's club, or men's club, for that matter, to another explaining views that I haven't think out.”

Not only is Armstrong's law office waiting for him, but so is his position as Saturday quarterback on Cahill, Gordon's touch football team. But Armstrong, a Yale and Harvard Law graduate, is the first to note that he's no football hero. “Can you imagine the groan,” he says, reccglecting his college football days, “that goes up from a crowd of 70,000 people at a HarvardYale game when Yale is 6 points behind and the receiver drops a pass in the end‐zone? I was that receiver.” At six feet, one inch and 180 pounds, he still looks like one.

Armstrong is also singularly modest about his career as a prosecutor under former U. S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau, a position he left four years ago with the reputation that served to bring him to the Knapp Commission's attention. While working for Morgenthau, he led the prosecution in 1967 of financier LliS Wolfson, and was apt and tenacious enough during the investigation to pick up and track down the link between Wolfson and former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. “I couldn't believe that someone so extraordinary as Justice was involved,” says Armstrong. “But I had to find out.”

Even now, there is every indication that Armstrong gets as much kick out of the copsand‐robbers aspect of investigation as he does out of the spotlight he's had on him lately. Last summer, while he and his staff were burning their usual midnight oil, they happened to look out the window to see two cops in a patrol car pulled up in front of an expensive restaurant. An elegantly uniformed waiter walked to the car with a tray of drinks. A few minutes later, he returned, napkin over arm, with two full‐course meals. “Boy,” says Armstrong, “did those cops pick the wrong spot. We took pictures of them night after night just for fun and then we told the police department's Internal Affairs Division about it and they took them in.”

But Armstrong stresses that, in spite of his tough and eyeopening investigation of the cops, neither he nor anyone on the commission or its staff are cop haters. “None of us came straight out of the world of academia,” he points out. “All of us have spent years in enforcement and prosecution positions. In fact, I'm not even against corrupt cops as individuals. It's easy to sit behind a desk and not be corrupted. The main thrust of this whole thing has not been to get the cops or get the Mayor but to create a realistic atmosphere whereby the department can reform itself,” says Armmstrong.

IN fact, the commission's final recommendations probably will show it in a cop‐loving, not hating, light. For among those under consideration are the legalization of gambling; higher pay and larger expense allowances for police to help them do their job; amnesty for cops who talk about corruption; rationalization of the unrealistic, crazy quilt of Sabbath, afterhours bar and construction site laws; better lines of communication within and without the police department, and Murphy's own policies, concerning the increased accountability of police supervisors for what their men are doing. It is also widely assumed that the commission will recommend that an independent body be created to oversee the department.

Both Knapp and Armstrong believe that the most important thing they have done—despite their underfunding, and a staff that had but 12 investigators and seven lawyers at peak strength—is to end for good the “rotten apple” approach to police corruption. For years, investigations have been designed to catch corrupt cops in the belief their removal would cure all problems. “We've finally blown the old rottenapple theory once and for all,” Knapp says, “and got even the highest police officials to admit to themselves and publicly that the police body has cancer. Now that the patient has admitted it, we can operate.”

He believes that many of the contemplated reforms have a good chance of being implemented and sticking. And not, Knapp says, just

” never thought anybody could do it; said Rangel. For the first time in years there's a glimmer of hope up here in Harlem that somebody in the white Establishment really cares.'” because of the investigation alone. “We've been enormously lucky,” he says, “in that this investigation has coincided with the beginning of the term of a police commissioner, Pat Murphy, who really wants reform. And no matter what anybody says, just the fact that the Mayor initiated this investigation leaves him with the mandate to make sure they (the reforms) are carried out.”

Armstrong points out that the recommendations the commission is considering, like its investigation, “are systemic in nature. As far as we know, every other investigation of the cops in recent history has been directed toward finding the corrupt individuals. Then everyone sat back afterward and said ‘Phew, we got rid of them and now everything is all right,’ and within a few months, or even days, the system picked up where it left off and we were back to square one. Don't kid yourself. We'll never get rid of corruption entirely. But if we can succeed—and I believe now we can—in grafting a new order of things on the police department, then we have a damn good chance of reversing the situation.”

“First,” Armstrong says. “there is the very mundane but important area of organization — getting closer supervision and more accountability. Along with this comes removing temptation with moves like changing the laws on gambling and construction or at least taking their enforce ment out of the cops’ hands. Then, there's the whole area of how the police police themselves, and there things are already changing. The department, by accepting the concept of amnesty, is beginning to turn bad cops around —something they never did before—and getting them to work within the force to expose other corrupt cops. Honest cops are starting to turn corrupt ones in. And, of course, the creation of an outside agency which would consist of people whose entire careers and promotion ladders were based on Investigation alone (a concept Murphy has already supported) , goes a long way to helping the police stay in line.

“Finally, with all this, we have to instill pride in the force. But I firmly believe that pride has been there all the time. It just hasn't come through. Look at the reasons Droge and Logan and even Phillips gave for joining. Each one noted that he wanted respect. But a cop, even an honest one, couldn't have that respect when everyone down to the grass roots knew where police corruption was at. By changing the system I think we can get rid of the kind of cynicism among the cops that has caused young and basically honest cops to start taking graft and, instead, let their pride in themselves and their own honesty counteract the corruption. And then we'll have real morale in the New York City Police Department.”

ARMSTRONG, of course, has gained critics with his investigation and its aftermath, but in the meantime he has also won innumerable friends. “Mike deserves every bit of the credit and limelight he's getting,” says Whitman Knapp. “He worked like a dog.” But the applause that rang warmest in Armstrong's ears came immediately after the first hearings in a telephone call from streetwise Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel, who had remained skeptical about the eventual results of the investigation. “I never thought anybody could do it,” said Rangel to Armstrong. “I never thought anybody had the guts to do it. For the first time in years there's a glimmer of hope up here in Harlem that somebody in the white establishment really cares about our situation.”

If that is so, then the Knapp Commission and its hardworking band of agents and lawyers have done even more —much more—than they set out to do, and that was enough to make them seem like naive dreamers. Now Armstrong can look back at a true‐iife fairy tale in which a small group of private, apolitical citizens turned the police force upside down—and look forward to the prospect that it may yet get turned right‐side up. He says:

“This whole thing was like a World War I airplane—you get a lot of baling wire and Scotch tape and you patch and patch and patch. Everyone kept saying we couldn't do it, particularly with what little we had. Maybe we were able to do it just because we didn't know it couldn't be done.”

A version of this archives appears in print on January 9, 1972, on Page SM16 of the New York edition with the headline: The Knapp Commission Didn't Know It Couldn't Be Done. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe